How to programmatically determine the document root in PHP?

Question

Here\'s a problem that I\'ve been running into lately - a misconfigured apache on a webhost. This means that all scripts that rely on $_SERVER[\'DOCUMENT_ROOT\']

Answer 1

In PHP5 there is the magic constant __FILE__ that contains the absolute path of the file in which it appears. You can use it in combination with dirname to calculate the document root.

You can put a statement like the following one in a config file

define ('DOCUMENT_ROOT', dirname(__FILE__));

this should do the trick